Putin as the Patron Saint of Right Wing Misanthropy

Why hatred of America is usually hatred of humanity

Aleksei Navalny has reportedly died in prison, and the timing of this tragic event for the sake of proving the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the anti-American right on the Russia question is absolutely perfect, coming on the heels of a series of humiliating videos of Tucker going to Moscow and declaring it heaven on earth. It’s one thing to just be wrong in normal and understandable ways. It’s completely different to go abroad and declare, “This poor country has food that is affordable in American dollars! They’ve developed technology to stop the shopping carts from rolling away!” Quotes don’t capture the essence of these videos. You have to actually see him sniff the chocolate cake from the MacDonald’s knockoff in Moscow as he declares the Russian version of fast food better for being free of GMOs.

Shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, I wrote an essay arguing that establishment liberals were driven by an irrational hatred of Russia. Meanwhile, one of my themes over the years is that conservatism is to a large extent an oppositional culture that is motivated by a reactive hatred of its perceived enemies. So of course, they had to go and prove I was absolutely correct, by becoming inverse caricatures of the left specifically in their attitudes towards Russia.

It’s easy to dismiss this as simple hatred for their own society borne from alienation, but I think something deeper and in a sense more logical is going on. The market skeptical right likes to mock “line goes up” ideology. It discounts GDP and corruption indexes and thinks that things like patriotism, a public acceptance of Christianity, well-defined roles for men and women, low tolerance for social deviancy, and a rejection of LGBT are actually much more important. Russia sucks by standard measures of how well a country is doing, but if there was a right-wing index of civilizational health, it would be near the top. People sometimes point out that, for example, Russia has a low church attendance rate, which means it’s not exactly a trad paradise, but that’s clearly not what anti-American right-wingers care about. If everyone in the US took their families to churches that accepted gay marriage, they wouldn’t consider that a victory. They care much more about keeping groups like gays, foreigners, and criminals in line than any kind of positive vision of people living healthy lives and forming families. Drag queens per capita is a superior measure to not only GDP, but total fertility rate.

These aesthetic preferences, like leftist economic planning, run into the hard realities of human nature. People flee to countries where GDP goes up, even if the number of drag queens is increasing at a faster rate. The anti-American right’s true enemy is therefore their fellow humans and what they want. This is naturally consistent with their growing hostility to democracy more generally. People not only vote with their feet towards “line goes up,” but they do the same at the ballot box, rewarding or punishing politicians based on economic performance. Market choices, political freedom, and freedom of migration must therefore all be restricted. Anything that allows human agency will naturally progress towards liberalism. The strongman like Putin is your only option, and if he launches a destructive war with casualties that run well into the six figures that’s at most a minor concern. Understanding right-wing anti-Americanism as misanthropic I think explains a mystery few people have noticed, which is that many in this camp cheered on the 2021 coup in Myanmar. They of course knew nothing about the country — and those who do universally find little to admire in its military — but simply had a preference for anything that restricts freedom and angers the State Department.

One might notice a bit of a contradiction in Tucker’s trip to Moscow, as on his visit to the supermarket he declared that Russian groceries were so affordable that it made you wonder whether ideology even matters. Trying to find logical coherence here is a mistake, as at other times he has said that principles like free speech are actually what is most important. What I think these kinds of blatant inconsistencies show is a lack of self-awareness. An anti-market and anti-American right that was open about its misanthropy would be able to freely admit that it cares about its aesthetic preferences more than anything, human freedom and living standards be damned. But they don’t want to bite that bullet, so need to pretend that Russia’s superior culture actually also creates a high standard of living for its people.

All of this is quite unfortunate, as I think that there are rational arguments one can make against America’s Ukraine policy. But political realities of moving towards a settlement are complicated by the fact that a portion of the right isn’t just skeptical of endless war, but has a need to believe that Russia is morally superior and deserves to do whatever it wants to Ukraine because it has fewer transsexuals. There’s a difference between wanting to work towards a peace agreement and cheering for Russian victory. A large part of the conservative movement is now in the latter camp, which is why it is more likely to demand a simple cutting of aid rather than a more focused package as part of a broader plan that takes into account political realities and tries to ensure that at the very least Ukraine can negotiate from a position of strength. When anti-war and pro-Putin sentiments are increasingly indistinguishable, the case for an open-ended commitment to Ukraine as the only realistic path forward only becomes stronger.